Another not, strictly, technical post.
But one that’s very dear to me and has been instrumental to my development as a person and a professional.
The IT sector is a hard skills sector with lots of depth.
The more you know on your subject, the more valuable you are, the more respect you can get from your peers and compensation from your employer.
But what once might have been a difficult quest ( know everything in my field) is now practically impossible.
You cannot know everything, you should not be trying to know everything and you should not be expecting anyone else to know everything either.
Even if you define everything as everything within my specific role or everything about a specific technology or tool, this is still a fool’s errand.
And yet, I see daily people (deeply knowledgeable or not, it does not matter) unable to admit they are not the single source of truth, that they do not know everything.
Why? In my, whatever it is worth, opinion it’s a combination of
- That’s what I’m being paid for
- That’s the poker face I need to project to maintain my status
- That’s what I need to believe
This, in turn, is a collision waiting to happen.
When their knowledge finds its limit and we have an issue, the focus should be solely on resolving it, not trying to handle someone’s bruised ego or stubborn attachment to my way that's been working for however long.
In my opinion, trying to bank on hard skills in that manner is a bad career strategy.
You will get backed into a corner and will need to be in a position to assert dominance or gaslight to get out.
Not a good place or strategy.
It’s much better, I think, to bank on results.
- I have knowledge, experience and the motivation to use them to help get us to where we are going. Whenever I need to enhance whichever of those, I will.
By aligning the individual’s goals to those of the org, one will never find themselves in that bad corner.